Friday, May 25, 2012

As global political power follow the means of production elsewhere, the publication I have been addicted to for an awfully long time serves us with an imaginative but oh so dewy-eyed analysis. Not good at all in my humble opinion, but too late to send it to the Letters to the editor by now.

SIR - In The Economist Special Report on the subject of the so called "third industrial revolution" (April 21st) an unpleasantly naïve perspective on matters was incurred upon the readers in a way I would not expect from Your pages. Any 10-year old with minor experience of working with materials understand what is necessary to make things durable, yet such familiarisation is perhaps just what contemporary urban dwellers are highly deficient of. Something 3D-printed may work for a plastic case, but not for an engine.

The leader on the same topic wrote of blurring lines between manufacturing and services in an equally theoretical way, disregarding fundamental knowledge of how things work (and what Rolls Royce produce). Furthermore is the clinging to manufacturing not romanticism as production and refining is what creates actual growth. Services and finance on a social theory & engineering level much less so. Such mild dumbness was not concealed by the obvious and much correct remark that government subsidies does not have any place in the equation.

Allowing "design" to be the new manufacturing and we might as well get rid of the idea of being industrious altogether. We will not receive the revenue needed for infrastructure by cutting each others hair. But then I will have to ride a carpented horse carriage if cars are to be printed anyhow.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

"Regarding Your suggestions of how to create
growth it is important to keep in mind that savings come first if You
want to invest, and France has run with deficit since 1973. Not one year
since then has Your country had government expenses and revenues in
balance."

"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants"(Sir Isaac Newton)

"you chose to act as if you had never been molded into civil society and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you."(Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France)

"Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve"(Sir Karl Popper)

Liberty is, of course, a loftier goal. But only those who have never known disorder fail to grasp that [order] is the necessary precondition for liberty."(Niall Ferguson in Colossus)

"When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude."(Theodore Dalrymple in What is Poverty?)

"If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. // We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."(Sir Karl Popper on the paradox of freedom in The Open Society and Its Enemies)

"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. // The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them."(Thomas Sowell in Is Reality Optional?)

"Government has become ungovernable; that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that is, it cannot see where laws should stop."

(G.K. Chesterton in Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State)

"to take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress."(The aim of The Economist)"This is the lesson: Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."(Sir Winston Churchill, October 29th 1941, Harrow School , London)